A living lab at PROMIS

With the objective of fostering entrepreneurship among Quebec immigrants and wanting to adopt an approach of innovation in the development of its services, PROMIS — in collaboration with the Institut de recherche sur l’intégration professionnelle des immigrants (IRIPI) — is developing a living labinitiative, an experimental framework where users participate and co-create innovative solutions to contemporary issues.

We are now recruiting! Visit the web page dedicated to PROMIS’ living lab.

Why a living lab?

Constantly developing its services to ensure that its users find everything they need under the same roof, PROMIS’ team is building a new program to support immigrants in their entrepreneurial projects. After a structured support in the preliminary stages of their projects, the participants will be referred to specialized economic development resources in order to carry out their project.

In order to offer a program that is 100% adapted to the reality of newcomers and to foster a culture of innovation within the organization, PROMIS wants to co-develop this initiative with the main players, namely users.

Thus, the organization turned to the living lab approach for several reasons:

It gives the initiators the opportunity to contribute to open innovation and, as a result, to increase high quality research about immigrant entrepreneurs ;

It allows the organization to adopt a stance towards innovation so it can face contemporary challenges differently;

It makes it possible to conceptualize and test new services in collaboration with the first users;
And it helps to develop new modus operandi and experiment innovation on its services.

“We already have internally a laboratory on continuous innovation. The living lab is only a natural progression of the culture of innovation that we have at PROMIS,” explains Delfino Campanile, director at PROMIS. “We believe that the Living Lab certification will allow us to better frame our participative approach and, consequently, will allow us to move to another level of continuous innovation in our services.”

The collaboration

The adoption of a Living Lab approach to foster entrepreneurship among Quebec immigrants will be done in collaboration with the Institute for Research on the Integration of Immigrants (IRIPI). IRIPI’s mandate is to innovate in order to meet the needs targeted by the organizations in relation to occupational integration of immigrants. Together, PROMIS and the IRIPI will merge their respective expertise to develop this major initiative.

This step is unprecedented, unheard of in the community-based organizations that support newcomers. PROMIS wants to be an actor of change to inspire other organizations to take the leap towards open innovation and other co-development methods.

The living lab is the perfect vehicle to collaborative research that will put users first in the development of our services. Thus, PROMIS will be able to accommodate a larger population and will maximize its impact on its community.

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